Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Dairy Non-Dairy Creamer

I WAS AT WAWA a while back and I needed a
coffee. Having just eaten meat, I was looking for an alternative to my usual
half-and-half. I saw they had a bottle of non-dairy creamer, and was about to
pour myself some, when I noticed an OU-D. Undeterred, I glanced at the label to
check if there really was milk in the ingredients. Alas, there it was. It was
in the “contains less than 2%” list, but it was there alright. So I was stuck without
my coffee, and bought a Red Bull instead.

One day it hit me. I could absolutely have used
that OU-D non-dairy creamer in my coffee after eating meat!

Why? It's simple, really. I mentioned that the
ingredient panel said that it contained less than 2% milk. As I realized then,
that is not good enough to be batel – 1/60 is about 1.6%, so going in on “less
than 2%” would be a bit of a gamble. But what I realized was that I obviously
wasn’t going be to drinking the creamer straight; I was putting it into my
coffee. That means that at the end of the day there was no chance that the milk
wouldn’t go under 1.6% of the total volume, which means it would automatically
be batel! So it turns out that I could’ve had my coffee after all. Oh well.

Your gut is on the right track. There is a Halacha that אין מבטלין איסור לכתחילה. However in this case it doesn't apply, because in this case there is no issur.

A normal case would be to take an small amount of pork and mixing it into a large pot of cholent, or pouring a teaspoon of milk into your pot of soup. There, you have issur - something which without rules of bitul would be assur to eat. There is is assur to be mevatel lechatchila. Here, you are simply mixing milk with water, so it doesn't pas to shtell tzu אין מבטלין.

[לענ"ד it's not pashut there is bichlal such a thing as bitul when it's heter and heter. עכ"פ here the nidon is if at the end of the day my coffee has ta'am milk, and it doesn't, so it's mutar.]